The Last Brigade
by Jack Parker
Summary: In the Outer Rim, Terros Ryker fights a vicious army as it sweeps down upon the planet he has adopted as his own. His brigade is the last line of defense, so far from the core that they cannot count on help from the fledgling New Republic. However, he fears that the true threat lies deep within his own mind, with the voices he hears speaking there in the dark. Serial project.
1. Chapter 1

Star Wars: The Last Brigade

1

As he ran through the desert, tasting the thick red dust coating the inside of his mouth, burning down into his lungs, Ryker could feel the planet's core tearing itself apart. The ground shaking as if something deep below had been woken from an ancient sleep, rising now in fury. Cracks running across the parched landscape. Far to the west, a mountain crumbled, great avalanches sliding down its sides, so far away that they were silent despite the huge clouds of rolling dust and earth that took to the air.

At the foot of that mountain had been a town, but he didn't have time to think about things like that. Not if he wanted to live.

He could see the ship ahead of him, sitting in the wide expanse of red. A Corellian ship, so heavily modified over the years that it no longer looked like the sleek vessel it had once been. Long and slender, the bow reaching forward almost like a needle, a gun turret rising from the top. The wings retracted now but ready to spring out when needed, tucked into the slots in the hull so that the craft looked like a hornet crouched and poised for flight. The ship was bouncing slightly as the earth moved below it.

Ryker kept running, flat out. He could barely breathe. He was about two kilometers past the point where he could no longer feel the burning in his chest, his legs, because everything was numb. It was just running on autopilot now. If his body gave out, there wouldn't be anything he could do. He willed it along. Dying with the ship this close would be worse than dying in the town as those dark mountains came down.

With a sudden lurch, the ground came up in front of him. Or it dropped off before him. It happened so fast that he couldn't tell. One minute he was running on hard-packed red dirt and the next he was sprinting over a ten-foot ledge, boulders and dust pouring down all around him, flailing his arms to keep his balance or break his fall as he went over. As tired as he was, he had time to curse in Correllian, a word his grandfather had often loved years ago when he was still alive, and then he hit the ground.

It was like there was no air in the world. It had all been stripped away. He gasped, opening and closing his mouth, pushing himself to his feet and staggering forward even though he couldn't breathe. Telling himself it would come back, it would come back. He tripped, fell, and picked himself up again, now drawing in ragged breaths. His whole body coated in the red dirt over his sun-darkened skin. In his hair.

The ship was still there. Closer now. The sun glinting on its surface, shining on this world as it had done for millennia, unaware that there would not be another morning, another sunrise. That tomorrow there would be nothing here at all but swirling rock and the bodies of the dead as they froze in vacuum. If those bodies even had the good fortune to be so preserved.

They might be nothing more than ash and memory.

Refusing to look anywhere but at the ship, Ryker ran flat out, the desert writhing about him in the throes of death and the agony of destruction. Deep in the back corners of his mind, he could hear someone laughing.


	2. Chapter 2

He held on to the voice for a moment, letting it fuel him with its mad laughter, letting it drive him. Then, as he reached the edge of the ship, keying its boarding ramp to descend with his comm, he swallowed the voice as he had done so many times before. He pushed it back down, away from his conscious mind, grabbing the rail and hauling himself forward. Before he was even halfway up, he keyed the ramp to close beneath his feet.

The air in the ship was the purest thing he'd ever tasted after the sand-filled desert. The gleaming silver corridor bucked slightly under his feet as he turned right, ran down to the bridge – or what passed for a bridge in this small craft – and dropped into the black, leather-trimmed captain's chair. The controls coming to life along the arms, blinking lights and readouts. He flipped switches and tapped screens quickly, by memory, watching as the viewport lit up and feeling the ship begin to hum with power beneath his boots. Then another voice spoke, this one not in his head, but coming from the speakers built into the chair.

"Welcome back, Captain Ryker. You have been gone two weeks, three days, six hours, four minutes, and seventeen seconds. The ship..."

"Thanks, Lender, but you can skip the standard update. If you don't, we both die. Got that?"

"I have no desire to die, sir."

"Glad we're on the same page. I need full power to repulsors and a escape trajectory. Any will do. Just get us off planet as fast as you can."

"Yes, sir. Plotting now."

The hum in the ship's body quickly grew to a whine. Ryker didn't bother to reach for the straps. If the planet blew while they were on it, the straps would just hold the pieces of his body to the pieces of the chair. He looked out the main viewport, which wrapped smoothly around the bridge, and it was like looking into a nightmare. The cracks in the desert were growing, some as wide as a kilometer across, with sand and stone pouring down. The mountain range was gone, nothing more than a huge cloud of swirling dust and debris. He glanced to port and saw one of the cracks moving toward the ship, the earth yawning as if to swallow him whole.

"Lender, any time now would be good."

"Repulsors are at 68%, sir. If you would have let me finish the report, I would have told you that a slight power leak caused us to lose our reserves. I'm replenishing them now with the engines, but it will be a moment."

Ryker grit his teeth, holding the arms of the chair until his knuckles turned white. "68% is fine. Activate now."

"Sir, I don't think it wise..."  
"Look, I didn't install you for your brains. I installed you to do what I say, and I say activate. Do it now."

"Sir, if you'll let me explain..."

"Now!"

"Yes, sir." The automated voice sounded resigned, even in the tinny speakers. The wine reached a higher pitch.

Outside, the chasm was only meters away and closing quickly. He could see down into it, and it looked like there was something glowing. Like a vat of boiling fire. A volcano's heart. Ryker had just opened his mouth to yell at Lender again, his hand reaching for the manual override, when there was a sharp lurch and the ship jumped into the air. It tipped as it jumped because the left side had begun to fall as the crack reached it. The ship fell to port for a heart-stopping moment, and then the repulsors corrected, screaming furiously, and launched the ship into the air.

Ryker was pressed into his seat as the craft rose and then spun, the inertial compensators unable to keep up with the reduced power, and then the ship was streaking skyward. That sky bright as the sun, one of the largest he had ever seen, glared down upon the dying world. Ryker reached his hand over and pushed a button on the side of the command chair; a screen above the main viewport clicked on, showing him a view of the planet's rapidly shrinking surface.

He could already tell that there was nothing left alive. How could there be when everything was rubble, from the mountains to the plains? The cracks were large enough now to be seen from altitude, giving the planet a scarred and torn look. Far off to the east, the ocean boiled violently. Gouts of flame came up from the cracks and steam likewise from that churning water. It was like looking at a space station with an oxygen leak and a fire inside, burning from the center out, all of that fire and pressure and smoke roaring for release into the stifling coldness of space.


	3. Chapter 3

"Lender," he said, "get us out of here. We don't know what that thing is going to do when it blows."

"Do you have a destination, sir?"

"Take us home."

"Hileos it is, sir. According to the charts, we should be there in roughly three point seven hours, Coruscant time."

"Not even enough time for a nap," Ryker said, but he couldn't pull his eyes from the viewport. The planet was beginning to jet flames that had to be kilometers across if you were on the surface, not that anyone was left there to know. Chunks of rock the size of Star Destroyers were rolling slowly into space, trailing smoke and ask until they hit the edge of the atmosphere and everything was still. The ship streaked away from this cataclysm with the engines roaring, but even so he did not know if it would be enough.

"How could I have missed it?" he muttered to himself. To spend more than two weeks on a planet and not find out that they were just planning on blowing it up. Killing them one at a time, as if those deaths mattered. As if a few slaughtered Krilens would save the population of almost a billion people making a life in that desert.

Had it been another planet, would they have stayed? Tried to colonize it or enslave it or whatever they were after? Maybe the fact that it was a wasteland had drawn them down at first, giving them an easy target, a weak enemy, but had in the end made the planet useless to them. So useless that they would evac in the middle of the night and destroy it as the sun rose.

He shook his head. Knowing the answers to all of those questions – and knowing if there could have been another fate for the planet – meant knowing what the Krilens were doing. Why they had come. What they wanted.

And he didn't know any of that.

"Sir, we are ready for lightspeed on your mark."

"Huh?"  
"I said, sir, we are ready for..."

"I got it, I got it," Ryker said, waving a hand and coming back to the present. "Let's just hang on for a second."

"But you just instructed me otherwise."

"I changed my mind."

"Sir, I don't know if that is such a good idea. If that planet explodes while we are in the system, our odds of surviving are only 1 in 129,458,227."

"Look, I just want to see if it really goes. If you detect that we're in danger, just jump, all right? Don't wait for me to tell you."

"So I should jump right now, sir?"

"Imminent danger!" Ryker snapped. He couldn't just let them all go. The men and women he'd fought beside, trying to liberate their home, despite what it was. Maybe it wouldn't be completely lost, wouldn't explode. Maybe there would still be someone alive on the surface who could start over, who could carry on in the memory of those who had died.

But even as he thought it, he knew it wouldn't happen.

"I'll tell you what," he said, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands, watching as another piece of the planet ripped itself free, burning in the atmosphere and then suddenly turning to dark, charred rock, breaking and shattering, as it reached vacuum. "If we're going to be killed in under three seconds, hit the hyperdrive."

"I hardly think three seconds is enough to..."

"Lender."

"Yes, sir."

And he watched the planet die. The destruction accelerated, with fires raging now on half of the planet's surface. The water already boiled off. The oxygen in the atmosphere being consumed, filled with smoke, filled with ash. It was as if he were not looking at a planet at all, but at a swirling cloud of riotous gas, stirred to this maelstrom by some inner force. The heart burning out of the planet. Years from now, people would come back to an astroid belt of blackened stone to see the remains of what had been.

He cursed in Corellian again, softly, under his breath. The silver ship drifting now in space, already swung to its positioning for the jump. A lone observer, for the people on a planet like this had had no warning and few ships to get to even if they had been warned. A few Uglies at the spaceport, maybe, or cargo vessels. Nothing to save them, nothing to do but fight to the bone for their homeland.

There was a change in the fire. He felt like he was looking right into the depths of the planet, and the flames seemed to recede. Being pulled back into their chasms. The land laid open. He leaned forward, for a split second thinking that the destruction had stopped, and then the planet exploded. It was so fast that he could hardly see it happening; flames leapt outward, the atmosphere fully on fire, the whole planet flying into space, each piece faster than a starship. Hurdling in all directions. The last roar of a planet that had existed for millions and millions of years, for time untold.

He had time to see nothing else as the starlines elongated outside the viewport, turning to brilliant steaks of light, and the ship flashed into hyperspace.


	4. Chapter 4

The ship dropped back out of hyperspace, the planet of Hileos hanging bright and blue before it, the wide green continents sweeping down to the ice-capped poles. One of the three moons, Hildrana, floated off to port, an uninhabited ball of white stone; the other two, each with their own settlements, orbited each other on the other side of the planet. There were two suns behind the ship, but both were so distant that only combined did they warm the planet perfectly to sustain life. Ryker's fingers darted over the control panel, punching in the landing sequence, and the ship began to drop through the atmosphere.

It was, all in all, a suitable replacement for Corellia, the homeworld that he had left at the start of the Rebellion against the Empire. He'd wanted nothing to do with either side, and, afraid that the system would be drawn in for one power or the other, he'd left it when he was only eighteen. His mother already dead and his father then leaving to join the Rebellion. That ship intercepted and destroyed by an Imperial patrol on the way to Yavin, where the Rebels were stationed. He'd only found out about his father's death after he had been on Hileos for two months, and he'd felt a sort of hollowness inside, though he'd been expecting it.

You couldn't join the Rebellion and live, he'd though then.

Ryker shook his head as the ship dropped through the wispy clouds in the upper atmosphere, the suns' light catching in them and turning everything to brilliant streaks of white gold. That all seemed so long ago. The New Republic had been swelling for the last seven years, picking up the pieces of the Imperial realm one by one. The rebels now the conquerers. Last he had heard, they had even taken Coruscant and were establishing their own headquarters where the Empire had once ruled.

He knew his father would have been overjoyed to see what the galaxy had become. The way that power had shifted. However, Ryker didn't know if he could share that joy. After all, what was to keep this New Republic from simply becoming the Empire? What was to stop them from ruling with the same iron fist in that endless search for power? Perhaps in ten years he would hear of another rebellion, this one with Mon Mothma or Leia Organa as the vile face of evil who needed to be killed. And if that happened, what had been the point of the first rebellion, or any that followed?

"Maybe I'm just cynical," he muttered.

"Maybe?" Lender said through the speakers.

Ryker snorted and stood up to watch the green continent grow beneath them. Heavily wooded mountains, sweeping fields below the peaks of snow and ice, and villages nestled into those warm valleys and hilltops. The homes tucked in among trees and boulders, dirt roads running between them and brooks of crystal clear water rolling calmly under bridges of wood or stone. He couldn't see those details yet, but he knew them by heart as he picked out the soft, twinkling lights below. It was evening in Livon as the first of the suns began to set.

He sat again as they came within two kilometers of the spaceport, a small but well-equipped complex with a pair of towers and a number of empty landing pads. The whole complex made from durasteel and probably the most modern building to be found on the planet. Two heavy turbolaser cannons sat on the sides of the pads, tracking his ship as they came in, and he saw the small contingent of TIE Interceptors waiting around them on their own pads.

Stolen, of course, for this was a planet that had never had allegiance the Empire.

A voice crackled to life over the comm system. "GDU-9876, we have you on scanners now. Why are you running under a number and not a name?"

"It's just a rental ship. Didn't think I'd need to name it."

"Rented through which company?"

"Orbital."

There was a pause. The traffic controller undoubtedly comming the rental company to confirm that this really was their ship. After a few moments, the controller came back. "What is your name?"

"Terros Ryker."

"Affirmative, Mr. Ryker. You're cleared for Landing Pad 17, and welcome back to Hileos."

"Copy, Control." He smiled slightly at the ground below. "It's good to be home."


	5. Chapter 5

Ryker walked down the ramp, holding the head under his arm. He could hear the slight buzzing sound as the eyes moved. It was autumn on Hileos and the air was crisp. The trees just starting to turn to the brilliants reds and oranges that would wash the countryside like flames in a month's time. He stepped off the ramp of the rental ship without looking back, hoisted Lender's head up higher under his arm, and walked toward the nearest gate in the low, duracrete wall that surrounded the spaceport.

His legs were still slightly shaking, but he tried to ignore it.

There was no fanfare. No one checking to see who he was or what he was doing on the planet. Hileos was too small for that. If you checked out with the controller and he let you land, you were pretty much free to do what you wanted. This still felt slightly strange to Ryker every time he came home. He'd spent so much time on places like Coruscant that he had forgotten what it was like not to have to go through ten thousand checkpoints with armed guards rifling through your bags.

Like most of the towns on Hileos, this one was a sprawling sort of town that moved gently through the foothills. Across the street from the spaceport was a softly rising hill, a dirt road running up over the crest. By the time he'd gone over the hill, it was like space travel was a thing of the past. He could still hear little sounds – the movement of the turbolasers as they came to bear on the next incoming ship, perhaps – but the town was now quiet and peaceful. The homes built of wood or stone or composites that looked like wood or stone. Trees hanging their branches over the street.

He walked for perhaps a mile, the light dust covering his boots, and then he sat down. Leaned back against a tree. Set Lender's head next to him, the eyes still moving. He closed his eyes and he fought down the thing in him that wanted to scream. After a time, when it had passed, he stood up again, picked the head back up, and continued down the road. By the time he reached his destination, he'd forgotten the incident.

Maybe on purpose, but what difference did it make?

He stopped outside of the low stone house and leaned against the gate. Forged from some old and blackened metal with streaks of gold running through it. Lanterns of the same hanging on either side of the gate on their own posts. Ivory wrapping around the eaves of the house. He grinned as he looked at it, set the head on one of the fence posts, and waited.

His host took ten minutes to open the door, even though they both knew that Ryker knew he was inside. He took the time to watch as clouds blew over and then disappeared. The wind moved the branches of the trees. A small bird with a long, scaled tail climbed a tree, wriggled out a branch, and took flight.

The normal things that happened on a planet that hadn't been blown to pieces like a landmine, like hell's fury opened there in the dark.

That, he tried not to think about.

When the door finally opened, the man stood looking out at Ryker. He was wearing a long, dark robe that hung in the dust of the threshold. One arm swayed loosely at his right side, the other just a stump, lost in an age now gone. His beard thin and well-kept. He was an old man and his skin showed it in wrinkles and discoloration, but there was a powerful life in his dark eyes as he looked at Ryker. Breathing slowly. At long last, he raised his hand in a sort of salute.

"I heard about Klatonia."

"What did you hear?"

"The things one usually hears after a planet is destroyed." The man's face showed no emotion. "I don't have to ask where you were."

"No, I shouldn't think so."

There was a pause, and then the man turned and beckoned to him to follow. Ryker scooped up Lender's head, swung the gate open in front of him, and walked onto the small stone path leading up to the house. He was no more latching it behind him when the man spoke without turning.

"Leave that awful droid."

Ryker looked around. "Out here?"

"No one will take him."

Ryker looked at the protocol droid's head for a moment, shrugged, and set it back on the post. Looked at it again. If anyone did steal him, he had plenty of ways of dealing with them. It wasn't that he was worried about.

He had just grown accustomed to Lender's presence. And that frightened him as much as anything.

Shaking his head, he walked into the house, where small candles were glowing on all of the walls and everything smelled of must and age.


End file.
